Darwinism and Design; Or, Creation by Evolution

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Hodder and Stoughton, 1873 - 259 pages
 

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Page 125 - There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Page 87 - We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
Page 130 - When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history...
Page 128 - To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Page 84 - I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good : Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Page 143 - Von Baer found that in its earliest stage, every organism has the greatest number of characters in common with all other organisms in their earliest stages ; that at a stage somewhat later, its structure is like the structures displayed at corresponding phases by a less extensive multitude of organisms ; that at each subsequent stage, traits are acquired which successively distinguish the developing embryo from groups of embryos that it previously resembled — thus step by step diminishing the...
Page 112 - Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
Page 181 - ... each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand ; what war between insect and insect — between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey — all striving to increase...
Page 230 - We hardly use the word ought in a metaphorical sense when we say hounds ought to hunt, pointers to point, and retrievers to retrieve their game.
Page 75 - Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humblebees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.

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